[senco-forum] Acceleread/Accelewrite (was Meaning of Reading Ages)

I can endorse this. I have worked this year with two Year 1 boys. One of
them was not even certain of the reading direction at the start of the
year. He would look at a consonant in a word, either at the beginning or
the end of that word, and guess wildly at what the word might be, as
long it started with the sound of the single letter he had recognised.
He did not understand the difference between words and letters. He is
now confidently working his way through a structured scheme of largely
decodeable books (with a smattering of high frequency words he has
learned, even though they are not yet decodeable to him). He has
followed a combination of phonemic awareness training, the reading
scheme work books and reading books, some games with high frequency
words, and Acceleread/Acclewrite. His reading and spelling is now in the
upper average range (I forget exactly what percentile, and this should
be treated with some caution as he is only one year inside the range for
the test in question). Still, it looks very promising I think. Mary

-----Original Message-----
From: senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk [HYPERLINK
"mailto:senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk"mailto:senco-forum-bounce
s at lists.becta.org.uk] On Behalf Of The Bodiens
Sent: 21 June 2006 14:55
To: senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk
Subject: RE: [senco-forum] Meaning of Reading Ages

The comments on when good quality teaching of reading is required are
wonderful to see in print...  my teaching experience of illiterate Year
8 students firmly influenced my opinion in exactly the same direction.
This year we have moved forwards with taking four children from each
year 1 class who had learned their initial sounds and who had the
concept of blending but who were not applying this to their decoding as
well as most of the rest of the class.  The TAs have been trained by me
to use Acceleread Accelewrite (thank you Martin Miles and Vivienne
Clifford, for such a useful programme). I am just marking up the
evaluations now.  One boy has progressed in spelling by 15 standard
points.  Others marked so far are less of a jump but still improvements.
Anecdotally the TAs and teachers are reporting more confident children
who are willing to have a go at blending and segmenting where they used
to just not do it outside of phonics lessons.

The TAs have learned useful skills they will carry forwards as they hear
children read, the children have benefited, the teachers are happy.
Parents meetings next term, I think.  (We break up next week - far too
hot out here to think now).

Philippa

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